e.g. if you make a day longer, then a month and year get longer too. As a result per tick you pay less interest, less infrastructure costs and less vehicle maintenance. Also vehicles depreciate slower, so all in all the game gets significantly easier

also... some people think that industries/towns produce too much in their current state, and so that the tick based industry and town "production" need to be changed to something day-ish (in that particular use case)

i get the impression that people mostly want two things from daylength: their trains (particularly steam trains) to last longer in real time, and to have more time to build out networks before they end up in the 30th century

way i play now is: andy releases something new, so i get a nightly, download that set, plus updates of anything else i have downloaded, play a map between 64x128 and 256x512 for a few hours to see what neat things andy has made for me...

lets assume a TRAXX engine, apparantly 4 MW of power output on 1.5 kV: EUR 0.03 / kWh -> 1 hour full whack costs EUR 120. They need to pay at least EUR for the train path if it's only the loc, and using 100% of the engines power with only the loc for an hour seems improbable

the loc is 80 000 kg, going 140 km/h (40 m/s): 18 kWh -> EUR 0.54. With 270 kN traction, the train should be able to stop in 12 seconds. It would need 550 meter to stop, so EUR 0.55. So a kamikaze break would still cost money.

though it's more something that sometime they decided that the poluter has to pay, but the taxes (on average) were not allowed to rise. So they increased the tax per kWh and subtract "average usage * (new tax per kWh - old tax per kWh)" from the total